Common Commitments Shredding

October 31, 2005|By Marvin Lazerson

When I first visited Paris as a student many years ago, I was struck more by the sidewalks than by the public gardens or even the food. The stench of human urine and the sight of dog poops were overwhelming. What did it mean that the most widely used public spaces -- sidewalks -- seemed devoid of any shared commitment to keep them clean?

Fortunately, I soon discovered other places, in Canada, Switzerland, Germany, in which common spaces were treated as if they were everyone's responsibility, in which public meant cared for by those who used it, and not simply the responsibility of the state.

That world has been changing. In a little town in southern Germany, known for its pristine lake, the community is in a dogfight over where dogs should be prohibited, fueled by rage of their owners' failure to pick up after them. In Zermatt, Switzerland, the amount of dog litter is escalating. In both places, doggie waste bags and bins are everywhere available, and often ignored.

My conclusion from this is that the notion of shared responsibility is disappearing, and therein lies the tragedy that the common commitments, which ultimately hold communities together, have shredded. Both the liberals and the conservatives among us have brought us to the point where hardly anyone ever feels an obligation to clean up our messes.

During the 1930s Depression and afterwards, liberals understood that government had a responsibility to level the playing field, to support those who sought success along the way, and to provide for those at the end of their lives. Universal public schooling, unemployment insurance, anti-discrimination laws and Social Security became the soul of the post- World War II liberal state.

But liberals made the mistake of believing that all wrongs were best corrected by government. They confused public responsibility with public management. They forgot that communities are held together by people's values and their willingness to commit to those values. More laws only lead to even less sense that we are in this together.

From the 1980s on, conservatives worsened the situation by denying that there was anything approaching a common good. Public responsibility has become simply another form of buying and selling. Retirees costing too much? Sell their earnings to investment managers. Public health in disarray? Have individuals pay more for their health care. The air polluted? Sell waivers to polluters. Energy costs too high and not enough timber? Sell off our national parks. Too many taxes? Let the wealthiest pay less. Public schools not working? Privatize them.

With government acting as if the public welfare were a dirty word and that whatever was public should be privatized, the notion of shared responsibility has simply disappeared.

I know it is hard to believe that so much could be pinned on the mountains of dog poops now routinely part of our lives. But think about it: We face two choices in our politics. Either we call upon the state to clean up the various messes, transforming our waste into public bureaucracies, or we appeal to individuals to clean while simultaneously destroying any sense of public responsibility.

Not a very palatable situation, at least to a dog lover like myself.

Marvin Lazerson is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania who carries, and uses, doggie bags.